Archive for the ‘How To’ Category

This is a very brief post to explain how I managed to speed up the viewing (that is, listing of files/directories) in Samba shares accessed via OS X. So, a bit of background: I have a file server at home which has some shared folders on it, shared using the SMB protocol. This is the […]

Jupyter (formerly known as IPython) notebooks are great – but have you ever accidentally deleted a cell that contained a really important function that you want to keep? Well, this post might help you get it back. So, imagine you have a notebook with the following code: and then you accidentally delete the top cell, with […]

Summary: Microsoft now provides a single, small installer to get all that you need to compile Python 2.7 binary packages on Windows! This is just a brief post to share the news on something that I didn’t know about until yesterday – but that would have saved me a lot of trouble! You may have experienced […]

Like a lot of academics, I write many documents in LaTeX – including almost all of my academic papers, and my PhD thesis! So, anything that can make my life easier is of interest to me. I was recently discussing this with a colleague (a co-author on a paper actually), and realised that lots of […]

(This is really Part 2 of IPython tips, tricks & notes – Part 1, but I thought I’d give it a more self-explanatory title) IPython (sorry, Jupyter!) notebooks are really great for interactively exploring data, and then turning your analyses into something which can easily be sent to a non-technical colleague (by adding some Markdown and […]

Google have recently introduced a new way of loading their javascript APIs: their Google API Loader. To use it, all you do is add a script tag in your HTML: <script src=”https://www.google.com/jsapi”></script> You can then load whatever Google APIs you want using code like this: google.load(‘visualization’, ‘1.0’); google.load(‘jquery’, ‘1’); google.load(‘maps’, ‘3’); google.setOnLoadCallback(function() { console.log(‘Callback’) }); […]

At the end of my last post I left you with a taster of what Part 2 would provide: a way of producing automatically-updating graphs of power usage over time. Part 1 was based purely on Python code that would run on any system (Windows, Linux or OS X) but this part will require a […]

After borrowing a CurrentCost electricity usage meter from my local library (if you’re in the area, then Eastleigh library will loan you one for free!), I decided to buy one, as I’d found it very useful in trying to reduce my electricity usage. The benefit of buying one as opposed to borrowing one was that […]

This post is more a note to myself than anything else – but it might prove useful for someone sometime. In the dim and distant mists of time, I set up a startup file for ENVI which automatically loaded a specific image every time you opened ENVI. I have no idea why I did that […]